We welcome 452f’s fifth year with the monographic section Contemporary Poetic Subjects, in its 8th issue. Its articles focus on the production of contemporary poetry, through the analysis of new representations of the lyric self, and also through different theoretical approaches, evidence of the need to review and update the studies regarding the verse in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature. We propose several itineraries: the dialog between tradition and experimentation, the construction of the poetic subject linked to the othernesses that arise from the text, or the examination of the subversion of the national imaginaries, among others. Similarly, these pages are covered by the musicality of the different literatures that gather on them: Galician or Catalonian, Spanish or French, Romanian and Chilean.

In Como prenden elas da nación? Sobre a poesia épica a comezos do século XXI, Helena González, whom we thank for her guest participation, draws up the difficulties on the concept of national community, from the transformation and subversion of the poetic forms of the epic tale in the work of Ana Romaní and Chus Pato. She proposes a new reading of the national identity from sexual difference. At the same time, Margalida Pons, in Il·legibilitat i tradició en la poesia experimental, explores the concepts of discontinuity, interruption and counter writing, not as a hiatus in a poetic continuum, but as vehicles in cultural transmission. This way, Pons investigates the reception and rereading of Gabriel Ferrater’s poetic work in so called experimental poets, such as Carles Hac Mor, Vincenç Altaió and Víctor Sunyiol. She also brings the semiotic dimension of the illegible to the discussion.

The following articles inscribe themselves in the field of poetries of the otherness, of the construction of the lyrical subject from the limits of language and poetical enunciation. Natalia Izquierdo delves into E. M. Cioran’s aphoristic writing to study his corporal and physical reverse, mapping the unfolding of a self that is able to transform writing into a theory of knowledge. Begoña Capllonch in La construcción del sujeto lírico en la poética objetual de Francis Ponge defends the impossibility of objectivity. It is not possible to turn a text objective by deliberately erasing or blurring the subject; this only highlights the strategy of camouflage. In short, objectivity is a utopian desideratum, whatever skills the poet’s objectual Muse may have. Little wonder, the dialogic relation that structures the self/other enunciative polarity confers Miquel Àngel Riera the possibility of surreptitiously set himself up as transcendent subject and as solid and weighed model of the human. Such is the reading proposal presented by Cèlia Nadal in her article El paper de l’alteritat en la construcció del subjecte poètic en l’obra de Miquel Àngel Riera. If, on the other hand, Joan Magrit’s self travels from a collection of poems to an anthology, from 1975 to 2004, it is not surprising that, on the way, the so-called poetry of experience had given way to a more embracing vision, capable of looking into depersonalized experiences, in an example of patient rewriting studied by Noemí Acedo in De Barcelona a L’Illa del Tresor. Lectura comparada de Crónica y Restes d’aquell naufragi, de Joan Margarit.

Finally, in the field of representation and redefinition of the poetic imaginaries, Macarena Urzúa, “from the other side” –as Cortázar would say–, offers a review of the Chilean complex poetic scene of the seventies and the post-dictatorship. The landscape and the city will raise to the category of privileged preservers of the individual and collective memory: a lesson of commitment and poetry brought to us by the author from that new Finis Terrae.

Thus, we celebrate a monographic issue whose objective is to propose new parameters of analysis on the formulation of poetic subjects and therefore to claim destabilization of gender limits as a space of negotiation between shape, emotion and identity.

In the miscellaneous section, Hana Fayez guides us through the ironic passages of the Beckettian labyrinth: the paradoxes in The Trilogy: Molloy, Malone dies and the Unnamable can be completely uncovered when examined as insoluble aporias, whose double edge is deliberately and humorously handled by the Irish master. Intertextuality and interchangeability compose exegetical mirrors that are not only used wisely by Fayez, but they also become precision tools in Mauricio Zabalgoitia’s hands (El sujeto de arriba y el sujeto de abajo. Representación y subjetividad en José María Arguedas y José Revueltas). The comparative study of these two recent novels delves into an analysis of an enviable technical exactitude. Indeed, Arguedas and Revueltas share some accidental similarities, regarding their national literary systems and the time of creation; however, through a careful look, such as Zabalgoitia’s, we discover dissimilar indigenisms, dialectal contrasts and, finally, not completely coincident ideologies and consciences. Two articles that open and close the section, based on revealed, if not dissolved, contradictions.